


This Will Be My Last Confession

by Le Mot de Cambronne (GilraenDernhelm)



Series: Politics/Soul [3]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: AU, Arno drinking a lot, Arno has a daughter, Assassin's Creed: Unity, Did I mention Arno has a daughter?, F/M, Father/Daughter Relationship, Historical slash, Lots of historical liberties taken, M/M, More moody emo prose, More whiffling and woffling, Old lovers and baggage, Part three part three, father/son relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-04-19 12:34:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4746647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GilraenDernhelm/pseuds/Le%20Mot%20de%20Cambronne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When news comes of an impending attempt on the life of Napoleon's son, an ageing Arno, not-quite-fresh from a drinking binge after being kicked out of the Brotherhood for the second time in his life, resolves to do nothing about it.</p><p>Nothing at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_I rented a house in the Tuscan hills and tried to lock myself away. But still they came, the memories. They came to me at night like saints on a cathedral clock; visions of light in a lightless room that mated noisily with the present until my chest ached and my joints became so stiff that I found it impossible to believe that not so long ago, I had been able to take on any of my fellow Masters – however young, however brilliant – and knock their teeth out of their skulls with one hand while pouring a drink with the other._

_I am fifty-nine years old, with a natural gift for hyperbole. Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps not. But with my hood, I had something: a raison d’être, d’exister. Without it – today – I’m –_

_-          what?_

* * *

 

I awoke to find myself lying on the drawing room floor with Aurélienne standing over me and kicking me in the ribs with the (already muddied) leather boots I had bought her for her sixteenth birthday. Beads of sunlight twinkled around her head like a crown of knives.

‘Are you dead, or just drunk?’ she demanded.

I groaned, turned over on my side and mumbled at her to go away.

‘Arno!’ she shouted, as though she hadn’t heard me.

‘I heard you the first time,’ I grunted, ‘now _va t’en et laisse-moi tranquille_.’

I heard her stomp noisily away from me and begin to gather up the empty wine bottles that littered the floor like books; my mind dimly taking note of the sound of the latch on the window clicking; my laughter dimly awakening at the sound of glass crashing onto the drive below. And suddenly my stomach was roiling at the grotesque odour of fresh air pouring into the room in quantities far greater than I could take; the sunlight was piercing my eyes and making a counterpoint of the back of my skull; and Aurélienne was careering across the room and thrusting the chamber pot under my nose as I retched and threw up spectacularly. She backed as quickly out of the line of fire as though I were pointing a gun at her, and as I collapsed once again into half-unconsciousness she swore and left the room; muttering to herself about drunken old men and self-pitying ignoramuses.

Aurélienne is my apprentice; the only person I had managed to do a halfway-decent job of mentoring before being kicked out of the Brotherhood for the second time in my illustrious career.

She is also my daughter, and does not know it; her mother being a woman of good, old-fashioned Assassin stock who takes her marriage vows seriously.

_Pity she didn’t mention it when she was screaming at me to fuck her harder._

My thoughts shattered like a rock through glass as Aurélienne swept back into the room and poured what felt like a gallon of water over my head. There was a great deal of coughing, retching, choking, and lashing out with flailing limbs until my failing strength and her impertinence were sufficient to get me propped up on one elbow and swearing at her.

‘What the… _fuck_ are you doing?’ I spluttered.

‘ _You_ look bloody awful,’ Aurélienne snorted as a strange scent began to fill my nostrils, _Seigneur Dieu, is that me?_

‘Go _away_ , Aurélienne,’ I growled with a viciousness that surprised me; that made me realise, with a shock even to myself, that I did not wish her to see me laid so low as this; ‘just _go_.’

The girl’s face fell, and she looked at me like a crestfallen two-year-old.

‘But…but I want to ask you something.’

‘Go ask your new mentor.’

‘I don’t like him.’

‘Life’s not fair. Get used to it.’

Anger roared up in her eyes like fire.

‘Honestly, Arno, just…GET UP!’ she shouted; trying to kick me again.

‘Not until I’ve had something to drink,’ I shouted back; shifting neatly out of the way.

‘It’s _eight o’clock in the morning_.’

‘It’s eight at night –’

“Someplace else.” I’ve heard it _all before_. Even your jokes are old and boring.’

Though that comment brought on a haze of hurt both physical and emotional, I affected nonchalance; folding my arms and crossing my legs neatly at the ankles.

‘I am not rising from this bed –’

‘This floor?’ Aurélienne corrected.

‘ – until I’ve had a fucking _drink_!’ I declared.

She glared at me with both anger and dismay and went to where her pack stood in the corner; returning a moment later to dump a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in my lap.

‘I’ll be in the kitchen when you decide to grow up,’ she snapped; storming out of the room for the second time that morning.

‘Could you pass me the bottle opener?’ I shouted after her.

There was no reply.


	2. Chapter 2

The smell of fresh coffee was sufficient to make me gag.

In the kitchen I found Aurélienne arguing with two people that I did not recognise, in Italian so bad it was almost incomprehensible. From her furious gestures in the direction of the (empty) larder and her equally-furious scribbling on a list that looked long enough to stock the Palace of Versailles for a month, I gathered that these two unfortunates were the kitchen staff.

_I have a kitchen staff?_

‘What do you mean this is the _only_ coffee you have?’ Aurélienne was demanding.

‘– that is, _Signorina_ ,’ the taller man was attempting to explain; ‘the _Signore_ always prefers to see to his own –’

‘You couldn’t wake a child up with this!’ Aurélienne exclaimed; ‘go to town at once and buy some more – Abyssinian, if you can get it –’

‘ _Che_?’

‘Abyssinian: _Abissiniano_ –’

‘It is too expensive, _Signorina_!’

‘Pay for it from the wages you receive for doing nothing.’

‘But _Signorina_ –’

‘Hop to it!’

The two men scattered so quickly that they almost knocked over the postmaster’s boy as he burst in with fresh bread, butter and cheese. Aurélienne paid him what looked like an exorbitant bribe, then looked over at me for the first time; her eyes carefully taking in the numerous, perhaps futile, attempts I had made to clean myself up.

‘Sit,’ she commanded.

I sat.

As she placed the food in front of me, and silently poured coffee, I realised in a sudden burst of nausea, exhaustion and desperation how hungry I was. I tore into the bread with my teeth, and watched from the corner of my eye as Aurélienne demurely sipped her coffee and made a face at the taste.

Then the sermon started.

‘I wish you’d move back to Paris,’ she grimly told me, ‘or at least to Versailles. You’re reckless with your health. No one knows you here.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ I smiled in reply.

‘Your servants are ripping you off,’ she insisted.

‘I didn’t even know I had servants,’ I insisted back, ‘I don’t _want_ servants.’

‘Tell me if the cheese is any good,’ she said.

There was a lengthy pause as I chewed and swallowed before telling her that it was, polite like a good little aristocrat, and she smiled at me, this girl with my eyes; as one smiles at a friend that one would not wish to change.

I enquired after her parents.

‘They’re fine,’ she replied.

I enquired after her siblings.

‘They’re fine,’ she repeated.

‘They don’t know you’re here, do they?’ I blandly surmised.

‘I left a note,’ she shrugged, and I buried my face in my hands and groaned in a way that was not entirely exaggerated as Aurélienne attempted to explain in that way adolescents have of turning every justification into an admission of guilt.

‘I knew Maman and Papa would say no if I asked them, so –’

 ‘ _Aurélie_!’

‘Don’t call me that; I’m not a child.’

‘Yes, you are.’

 ‘I’m sixteen. I should be able to go where I want.’

‘But you can’t, and you do, so who does your mother blame at the end of the day? _Me!_ ’

‘You were always a bad influence.’

‘I should hope so.’

I was about to think of some further witty repartee in which to engage when I realised, belatedly, and with an unpleasant shock, that she was here, with me, in _Italy_ , and the contemplation of the oncoming shitstorm was sufficient to make me want to start drinking all over again.

‘How the fuck did you _get_ here?’ I asked in disbelief.

‘I rode,’ Aurélienne shrugged; as though it were nothing at all.

‘From _Paris?_ ’ I pressed.

‘ _Yes_ ,’ she drawled; rolling her eyes at me as my mind choked itself up with visions of highwaymen, rapists, soldiers and dozens of other people who could have harmed her on her innocent little jaunt.

‘I should never have taken you on,’ I despairingly observed, ‘you’re more trouble than you’re worth.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, Arno,’ she snorted.

‘ _De rien_ ,’ I replied.

I remembered the process of taking her on in the same way that I remembered my own name; the meaning of it changing constantly over the years, and yet always coming back to where it started. It was 1816, and my lover my friend my enemy, yes, my enemy, Bonaparte, had been in exile on Saint Helena for exactly a year. I had decided to mark the occasion with some self-destructive carousing at the Palais Royal: a fine idea, but one that soon diminished into acquiring twenty bottles of wine and hanging about on the square beneath Notre Dame, looking at the stars and thinking thoughts that were tiresome at best.

 _He_ had always loved the stars. I remembered a spring evening – warm, but with enough of a chill coming in through the open window to make goosebumps spring up in tiny, white, harmonious legions across his bare skin – when we had lain quietly abed and whispered to each other with the moonlight streaming in through the open windows; the candles lying dark and charred in their holders. With the tips of his fingers he traced circles up and down the muscles of my arm, again and again, as though fascinated by the shape of my skin, and I told him, in a hushed voice, that I did not believe in God. He smiled at me; pale, delicate and luminous in the moonlight, and glanced upwards at the stars with storm-grey eyes.

‘Then who made that?’ he asked.

As I gazed up at the stars that night in front of Notre Dame, the same stars that he and I had talked about, from the earth of a different world, a strange, shuffling sound filled my ears; like a child’s feet lingering nervously on the threshold of a forbidden room. And then I saw her, at the far end of the square: a girl of about five, walking with the agonising slowness of someone who wanted to break into a run, but was forcing herself not to.

I saw her eyes widen in relief at the sight of the hood I wore; saw her torn clothes and wild dark hair as she broke from a walk into a trot, and no sooner had I realised who she was, and felt my heart constrict in my chest, that she had flown across the square and flung herself into my arms; breaking down into miserable tears and sobbing uncontrollably against my shoulder, as though she would never stop.

I could not have been more helpless had she stabbed me in the neck.

I patted her awkwardly on the back and whispered something insipid about everything being better tomorrow, and realised, with emotion too devastating to describe, that this was the first time I had held my daughter in my arms, or even spoken to her.

And suddenly it seemed to me that she was of a weight just right for me to carry with both arms; that her entire, miniscule skeleton, life force, and blood, had been moulded perfectly together to fit the shape of my hip, and I pushed the thought away violently, afraid.

I asked if she was hurt.

She’d been robbed, she said, and roughed up as she tried to find her way out of the labyrinth-like slums of Saint-Michel; trying to get back to the compound and always finding herself a little more lost each time she tried.

 I asked her her name. She told me mine.

‘My _maman_ thinks that you’re an idiot,’ she said.

That angered me.

‘Then your _maman_ must be unaware that it takes one to know one,’ I shot back.

‘Don’t you talk about my _maman_ like that!’ she abruptly shouted, punching me in the shoulder; and when I snorted in response, she pulled violently on both my ears; inflicting such excruciating pain that I almost dropped her.

‘Let – let _go_ of my _ears_!’ I roared.

‘Say sorry!’ she insisted.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, your mother is a genius, _sorry_!’ I yelled out in agony; my words falling over each other in their eagerness to escape; and when she let go of me, my ears were ringing and most probably turning pink.

I imagined that I could put her down now – she was old enough not to be carried everywhere – but in spite of her infernal cheek, I found that I did not wish to.

As she smiled in triumph – presumably celebrating her victory over my ears – I asked her what a well-brought-up Assassin child was doing wandering about in a Parisian slum at midnight. The question made her cry again, and this time, the sight broke my heart.

Earlier that day, she had been on the way to the _boulanger_ when she had somewhat delightedly attempted to run through a ‘pretty, shiny, bluey, see-through curtain’ that the man had installed at the side of his shop.

She had woken up with blood pouring out of her nose and a solid brick wall standing where the pretty curtain had been not two seconds previously.

It had taken a few minutes of attempting (successfully) to pick herself off the ground; of trying (unsuccessfully) to stop the ringing in her ears; and of conducting a thorough examination of the wall that had appeared transparent (and blue) for the child to come to the uncharacteristically-mature conclusion that she was afflicted either with madness or with Eagle Vision, and she had rushed home, half-terrified of knowing, half wanting to know, to ask her parents which one it was.

She had found no one at home but her elder brother, who had teased her so mercilessly about her delusions of grandeur (‘little Aure thinks she’s special’ ‘little Aure thinks she’s better than all the family for generations past’) that she had run crying out of the house and lost herself; the blue madness finding her everywhere she ran; flashing across her eyes for every waking second until she felt like she was drowning; the world reducing itself and expanding itself into walls and more walls and absences of walls and turquoise figures fleeing like angels without noticing the red ones, so many red ones, legions and legions of red ones everywhere; evil, bad people everywhere; there couldn’t possibly be so many bad people in the world; it just wasn’t possible –

‘I must be mad,’ Aurélienne sobbed; burying her face in my shoulder, as though afraid to see, ‘if it’s just me, then I must be mad.’

‘It isn’t just you,’ I whispered to her; holding her to me fiercely and rather wanting to knock her brother’s teeth out, ‘it doesn’t only run in families. Don’t listen to your brother. He’s obviously an idiot.’

She took her head off my shoulder and looked at me.

‘Really?’ she sniffled.

‘I’m the only one in my family who has it, and I don’t think I’m mad,’ I lied, ‘yet.’

She studied my face for a moment, as though making absolutely sure that I wasn’t playing a trick on her. Then she smiled at me through her tears and kissed my cheek, and I was completely and utterly lost.

We sat by the Seine and talked nonsense for a while. Questions such as ‘so do I get to kill _all_ the red people?’ gradually turned to ‘have you ever climbed Notre Dame?’ and then to ‘could _I_ climb Notre Dame?’ and inevitably to ‘could you climb Notre Dame with me on your back?’; which then progressed to

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘ _Yes_.’

‘I’m drunk.’

‘So?’

‘So I’ll drop you.’

‘Please?’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘NO.’

Eventually, I took her into the cathedral itself and high up into its spires; to the labyrinth that one would not mind getting lost in: the labyrinth of stone in the clouds. We stepped over the smashed marble heads of the kings of Israel; the smashed bones of an entire generation; and when we reached the bell towers, I took her the last small part of the way just as she had asked, with her belt secured somewhat precariously to mine.

We watched the stars, and Paris, until dawn. And Aurélienne, from that day, was adamant that she wanted no other mentor. Her mother had a fit, as did the man that she called father. But no kind of intervention occurred beyond words; a fact that I hoped, at least on her mother’s part, stemmed from some grudging remainder of sentiment.

I trained her for the next ten years, and she was glorious. Then one morning I decided to stab Sir Hudson Lowe in the stomach in the middle of a crowded London street, and one moment of thoughtless, if infinitely satisfying retribution against the man who had torn my lover my friend my enemy, yes, my enemy, Bonaparte’s spirit out of him – Bonaparte’s jailor – had meant the door, for the second time, for me.

Aurélienne was looking at me from across the kitchen table, today, in Italy, in the year 1827, and I could tell that she was remembering too. And I wished with all my soul that I could lean forward and press her to me, and kiss her forehead, and tell her: ‘You’re mine. You’re my blood. You’re my daughter. And I am prouder of you than you could possibly imagine.’

Instead, I asked why she had come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter attempts to redeem a certain awful scene from a certain excellent film.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Click here for the Wikipedia article on Napoleon II:  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_II

‘The British government _always_ wants to assassinate Napoleon II,’ I snorted, ‘if they were any good at the business of assassinating, he would have been dead long ago.’

Aurélienne’s entire face fell; as though she had expected her words to have a greater effect on me.

‘I take it you know why they always fail,’ she said.

‘We always send someone to assassinate the assassin,’ I replied, ‘or assassin _s_ , depending on –’

‘Not anymore, we don’t,’ Aurélienne blandly interrupted; ‘it seems that management has given up on the Bonapartist cause: or whatever cause may involve the boy turning out to be better than his father.’

The blood in my veins was suddenly pounding and swirling like wine, and seeming to gush into my throat like bile at the memory of the pleading grey eyes, _‘please,’ he had begged me on the day that he died, ‘please –’_

I stared at my daughter, but I could hardly see her.

‘Better than his father?’ I repeated.

‘They don’t even want us to call him Napoleon II anymore,’ Aurélienne told me; sounding both disgusted and annoyed; ‘only by his rightful title: the Duke of Reichstadt.’

‘ _Why_ , for God’s sake?’ I asked.

Aurélienne pushed her coffee away from her and slumped back in her chair.

‘Apparently he is becoming a great deal more impassioned in his pleas to his grandfather the Emperor to let him assume command of a battalion in the Prussian army,’ she said; ‘our spies inside Schönbrunn say the old man is on the point of yielding.’

 _‘Please, my friend,’ Bonaparte had pleaded on the day he died, ‘please’_ –

‘Wanting to join the army doesn’t mean the boy is a tyrant in the making,’ I observed; my fingernails digging so hard into my palms it hurt, _for God’s sake, control yourself –_

‘I agree,’ Aurélienne observed; her voice hesitant; as though lingering on the edge of an unseen abyss; ‘but the whole world is convinced that one sniff of power in the boy’s nostrils will be enough to set the ball rolling through another twenty years of war and French dominion on the continent. No one’s called him anything but Franz since his third birthday, but the very name of Napoleon –’

‘The very name is enough,’ I mumbled; and it was true.

_Sea. Humidity. Bed sheets soaked in sweat and death._

‘ _You were the first person I told my name,’ Bonaparte had whispered, smiling at me on the day he died, ‘my new name…my French name…’_

‘Do you know when?’ I asked Aurélienne; my daughter who was not mine.

‘They’re moving him to the South for his health,’ she told me; her voice suddenly stronger; reassured by the reality of being listened to; ‘he’s a consumptive, apparently, and needs – ’

‘He’s a _consumptive?_ ’ I repeated, suddenly enraged.

‘– his mother wants to send him to take the waters in Italy,’ Aurélienne plunged on; ‘but the Emperor won’t let him out of the country –’

I felt walls slamming up around me; walls made of anger and resentment and un-belonging; of _politics_ and the people who practiced them; who lived them; killed for them; became un-human for them. People like Him. People like Us. People who would defend a sick child one day and leave him to die the next.

‘I take it they’ll assassinate him _en route_?’ I asked.

‘There are plenty of small _chateaux_ and rustic _locales_ along the way,’ Aurélienne nodded, ‘it’s just a matter of picking which one. And having lost so many people trying to kill him in the past –’

‘It’s likely they’ll send more than one of their best,’ I finished.

Then I looked at her pointedly.

‘Is the British Brotherhood involved, or are they sending the usual crowd of mediocrities?’

Aurélienne shook her head.

‘That’s the part I can’t work out,’ she said, ‘I thought if you had contacts, you could ask them –’

‘ _No_ ,’ I interrupted, ‘for God’s sake, don’t give those English pigs ideas.’

There was a brief silence, during which I stared at Aurélienne and she stared pointedly at her fingernails.

‘How do you know all this?’ I enquired.

‘I heard my parents talking with the Mentor,’ she shrugged.

I gave her a withered look.

‘In other words, you’ve been listening at doors again.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good girl.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Did you really come all this way just to tell me a story you heard at a door?’

Her face fell once more, and I knew, by that very gesture, that she had.

‘ _Why_ , Aurélie?’

She picked at the splintered wood on the arm of her chair and would not meet my eyes, and for one, mad moment, I was reminded of Élise in her more vulnerable moments; when she would look anywhere, _anywhere_ , but at me.

If Élise and I had had children, would there still have been an Aurélienne?

‘It’s not fair,’ Aurélienne mumbled; like a child afraid to speak.

‘Not fair?’ I softly repeated, in a way that I hoped would encourage her to continue.

‘It’s _not_ ,’ she insisted, ‘he’s just a little boy without a father.’

‘He’s your age,’ I remarked.

‘All boys my age are little boys,’ she said, ‘and now he has to die because of things his father did.’

 _Things his father did_. The phrase unclenched a thousand memories within me; a thousand unspoken, remembered things that I suddenly, madly, wanted to tell her; if only for the sake of telling someone.

‘His _father_ ,’ I remarked, ‘was a narcissistic intellectual misogynist with absolutely no consideration for his fellow human beings.’

‘ _Really_?’ Aurélienne observed.

 “I can’t find my copy of _Gallic Wars_ ; where’s my _Gallic Wars_ ; Dorian _have you seen my Gallic Wars_?” I imitated, “what? It’s two in the morning? Fair enough, but have you seen my _Gallic wars_?”

‘Did you _know_ him?’ Aurélienne asked in amazement; her eyes the size of saucers as she looked at me…as I realised that I couldn’t tell her; not even for the sake of telling someone.

‘I ran into him… once or twice,’ I softly pronounced, in a voice that firmly declared the subject closed, ‘over the years.’

Aurélienne failed to take the hint.

‘What was he _like_?’

‘I’ve told you what he was _like_.’

‘Come off it, Arno. Don’t you admire him just a _bit_?’

‘I was _raised_ by aristocrats,’ I snorted, ‘that doesn’t mean that I approve of them ruling the world.’

‘You dislike Napoleon for being an _aristocrat_?’ Aurélienne disbelievingly reasoned, and she jumped as I slammed my fist onto the table and found myself shouting at her for no apparent reason.

‘It’s not a question of disliking him!’ I growled, ‘we do not _choose_ our targets; nobody _asks us_ whether we like or dislike them, or whether killing them is _fair_ –’

‘I don’t know if I like that very much,’ Aurélienne softly told me; her voice heavy with doubt.

‘Misgivings are normal,’ I somewhat-brutishly replied, and disappointment welled up like tears in her brown eyes; disappointment and despair; as though she had been longing to be told of the mistakenness of her hesitation and assured of her place in the world: the place in the world I had been training her for.

Our eyes met – our eyes that were the same – as she slowly asked me the question dreaded by every mentor since the day our order was founded.

‘Isn’t there a better way?’

 _Fuck. Shit._ Fuck.

‘No,’ I told her; trying to sound confident. Absolute. Convinced.

Aurélienne was still picking at her chair, and resolutely avoiding my eyes.

‘But…do we _have_ to listen?’

‘Yes.’

‘ _You_ didn’t listen.’

‘And look at me.’

At that, she did; her eyes taking me in in all my aged, hung-over, failed, faded glory,

‘What do you want me to _do_ , Aurélie?’

She looked intently at me, and for a moment I was sure that she would speak, and answer me, and tell me.

Then she slumped back in her chair again and told me it was nothing.


	4. Chapter 4

I sent Aurélienne’s parents word express; informing them that she had arrived with all her parts intact and would be returning post the next morning. The child protested in the usual way – glowering with her arms folded and her lower lip stuck out – and we passed the rest of the day in silence; Aurélienne lingering at the corners of my vision as I drank and slept and slept and drank.

That night, when I couldn’t sleep, I inevitably ended up watching _her_ sleep. She dozed like an urchin, in her shirtsleeves and boots; and glancing at her right cuff, which had been hidden, before, by her coat, I noticed with exasperation that she was wearing a phantom blade.

I went to her, undid the buckles, and slipped the weapon from her arm, whereupon she frowned in half-conscious protest and muttered something about my being no fun at all.

‘Where did you get this from?’ I demanded.

‘Mother,’ she mumbled.

‘Stole it?’

‘ _Liberated_ it.’

‘And how many times have you accidentally stabbed yourself since you left Paris?’ I insisted.

‘Lost…count,’ Aurélienne murmured.

She turned over on her side and went back to sleep, crossing her arms as she did so, and I perceived, in that moment, that she wore a leather slave ring on her left index finger: among Assassins, a lover’s token.

I was seized by a sudden, irrational desire to shake her violently awake, find out the boy’s name by any means possible, ride back to Paris and murder the little shit; preferably through impalement, or drawing and quartering, or boiling. Boiling was always effective.

But as I stood in the dark contemplating violence, my rational mind told me several things.

That at sixteen, I had already loved Elise; had already known that I was hers.

That at an age not much older than that, I had met Bonaparte, and had known that I would always be trapped.

That I had no right to dictate the way she lived her life, because she was not my daughter: at least not in any way that mattered.

Aurélienne looked cold and vulnerable without the bedcovers. I tucked them up to her neck; and my hand lingered briefly at her cheek; just to make sure that she was breathing.

I watched Aurélienne’s face change as she dreamed; a crease between her eyebrows; the full moon tracing the sharp lines and cheekbones of her face. Eugenie’s face.


	5. Chapter 5

Aurélienne’s mother was the only woman – after Élise – for whom I had felt anything resembling what novelists and adolescents might have called love.

She didn’t like me very much – a sentiment that I heartily reciprocated – and I find it impossible, today, to think of her without feeling the stirrings of an infernal protective instinct towards her that inevitably leads to anger, regret, self-loathing and a desire to seek my answers at the bottom of the nearest bottle.

Eugenie and I were made known to each other in 1811, when she had discovered a link between a spate of shoddy failures in the French Brotherhood and a certain band of miscreants living in an expensive apartment in Ile de la Cité that they would never have been able to afford by themselves. Eugenie thought – correctly, as it turned out – that the situation was not the consequence of Assassins being innately-miserable people who all fuck their lives up sooner or later and inevitably seek respite in _les paradis artificiels_ , but that the opium epidemic sweeping across Paris was some new Templar experiment in social exploitation in which the damaging of Assassin competence was just an added bonus. When she asked management’s permission to pursue her findings, expecting to be praised for tailing and interrogating dangerous individuals and telling nobody what she was doing, she found herself rapped over the knuckles and barred from taking her enquiries further unless she agreed to do so with a Master.

You must understand that having been raised by Assassin parents in an Assassin compound with Assassin friends, Assassin tutors, Assassin acquaintances and Assassin enemies, Eugenie, at twenty-three, considered herself as good as any Master, if not better, and thought it a positive scandal that she did not hold the rank already. Being of well-established Assassin stock, as was her husband, she looked on me as a mongrel at best and a traitor at worst, so her mortification upon grudgingly accepting the ultimatum put to her and being lumped together with _me_ , the _enfant terrible_ of the Brotherhood with my Templar foster-father and my Templar-lover and my quasi-Templar upbringing, cannot be overstated. She spat a great deal of blood about injustice and unfairness and ‘not getting anyone better’, and behaved very much as though I did _not_ have better killing, better drinking, better _things_ to do than supervise some spoiled brat who needed someone to hold her hand while she chased around Paris after imaginary Templars with some bizarre penchant for handing out free drugs. To this day, I’m not even sure she’s aware that _I_ agreed to take _her_ on, _not the other way round_. But it would have been far too much trouble to refuse, and besides, I was bored.

We were set up in an apartment across the road from the thugs in question, and watched. When they left, and they left quite often, we tailed them, sometimes alone, sometimes together. She was reckless, disobedient and stupid. She went off on her own. She took every suggestion as a reprimand and every reprimand as a slap in the face. Her technique was insufficient for a person of her age, and uncharacteristically sloppy for one raised in the French Brotherhood, yet she herself had nothing but the greatest pride in her own slipshod abilities. When watching her _parcourir_ , I regularly feared that she would fall and break her neck, and in combat she seemed less concerned with killing things than with turning her body into a slab of meat that any fool could use for target practice. I told her all this without reserve, and was rewarded in ways that I have already described.

And yet she could walk into any room, or square, or crowd, and know instantly what had happened there. When. How. And above all, why. I could teach her nothing in that regard, and she could not teach me. What she had could not be taught.

In the beginning I wondered why she had not been taken away from violence and taught how to use her talent in a way that might make her happy. Then one evening, she had fallen asleep while on night watch, and once we had exchanged shifts (I had not had the energy to do anything more), her existence had drawn itself for me in thread made from murmurs and dreams.

In her sleep, she would tell stories of her life. She would plead with her children not to leave the compound alone. It was dangerous outside; outside there were bad people. She would plead with her father not to make her fight; to allow her to read, to dance, to learn to play the violin. She would plead with her husband not be so kind to her: she didn’t deserve it. Most of all she pleaded with her husband not to let her wake up; _no…Jean-François…don’t let me wake up, please don’t let me._ I never discovered what that meant.

Once, she screamed in her sleep. It was a horrifying, agonising sound; the kind made by soldiers bayonetted on the end of war. I was at her side and shaking her shoulder before I could stop myself; her name sounding strange in my mouth, _Eugenie_ ; her skin boiling through her chemise as my fingers crooked in her shoulder.

She came tearing out of the dream like a drowning woman breaking the surface of the water. Every instinct in me told me to treat her as I might a frightened child; to hold her and mutter useless words of comfort that would somehow make things seem better. Instead, I said nothing but her name.

Anything else seemed dangerous for reasons I did not yet understand.

She reached out and held my shirt cuff with one hand while messily wiping her eyes with the other. They were large and extremely grey, with a promise in them that one could sense rather than see, that in a storm, they would turn blue and swallow up the clouds.

‘How much did I…did I say a lot?’ Eugenie mumbled; her fingers forming the gentlest of pressures on my wrist.

‘No,’ I hastily replied.

I lied.

She saw me lie, and said nothing.


	6. Chapter 6

‘Ready?’

‘Just do it, Master.’

I took the hilt firmly in hand – warily observing as Eugenie closed her eyes and clenched her fists (as though either of those would help) – and yanked the blade from Eugenie’s shoulder.

The sound of the steel bursting from her flesh was the same as that made by champagne corks that pop cheerfully from bottles of liquid gold, except in this case, the gold was red; its appearance prompting screams rather than applause.

‘Seigneur… _Dieu_!’ Eugenie screamed, pounding her fist on the table again and again; and shrieking all the louder when I applied a poultice and began to strap the (shallow) wound up with all the delicacy of a novice army surgeon, ‘fuck, fuck, _fuck, FUCK_!’

The degree to which this display irritated me cannot be expressed. On one hand, I rather wistfully wished that she would transform into a man, so that punching her in the face would not be objectionable. On the other hand, each scream filled me with the kind of unspeakable horror that would have seized me had I been required to do this to a child.

‘Stop acting like a child and pull yourself together,’ I growled unsympathetically, tying up the bandage in a rather brutal fashion and doing my best to ignore the resulting yelp, ‘and incidentally, if a stranger in the street ever addresses you as ‘Assassin’ again, I would advise responding with a quick knife to the throat instead of ‘ _yes_?’!’

‘And what if that person had been an ally?’ Eugenie fumed.

‘An _ally_?’ I exclaimed, ‘you’ve spent the past few weeks doing nothing but chase Templars – imaginary ones, admittedly –’

‘They are _not_ imaginary!’

‘– and you’re speaking to me of _allies_?’

‘What do you mean, they’re _imaginary_?’

‘Oh, they’re Templars, I grant you. They are, however, only interested in debauchery and hanging about in empty houses –’

‘Master!’

‘–and _not_ in the Machiavellian machinations you suspect them of.’

‘There is _more_ to it than that; I know there is!’

‘If there is, you are certainly not the person to find it. You have the abilities of an overly- pubescent teenager –’

‘ _Master_!’

‘– not to mention that there has never been a successful Assassin in history who has had a private life as convoluted and ridiculous as yours! I’ve no idea how you manage to concentrate on your work when –’

‘What do you know about my private life?’

I cursed inwardly and did not reply; and suddenly her blood loss began to show. Her grey eyes, turning blue, fixed on me and then on my shoes, before flickering to my eyes again.

‘So I do talk in my sleep,’ Eugenie mumbled.

‘Yes,’ I replied; taking an involuntary step forward as her fingers closed around the back of a chair and pulled it away from the table so that she could sit down.

If she noticed my indiscretion, she did not say it, and ran her bloodstained fingers through her hair as I slowly crossed the room and slipped into the chair beside her.

The blood had crept into the crevasses of her hands. They reminded me of lines drawn on a world map. She did not look at me as she spoke, but I looked at her. And the whiteness of her face, and the nearness of her tears, and the way her fingers crooked into her shoulder, as mine once had, reminded me in a new way that she did not belong in this world; this place; this work. She was soft; only this time, as I thought it, I did not do so with ridicule.

‘I never have, you know,’ she murmured, ‘talked in my sleep. At least not often. Not until I began work with you. In the past, it has only happened occasionally…but when it has, my husband has been there. But ever since this began, the nightmares trouble me again.’

‘Forgive me,’ I whispered; forcing myself to look at her. She wiped her eyes savagely with one hand, all the while avoiding mine; and smiled in a way that moved me, then irritated me.

‘You do it too, Master, so forgiveness would serve no purpose. Let’s call it an exchange and be done.’

In her voice there was no condemnation or pity, but it turned me cold. The past – the past that was always there, that crept within me, behind my eyes, behind my walls, the walls I had made for myself – reared up somewhere beyond my vision and covered me with its pale knives. I saw the same frost settling itself over Eugenie’s shoulders, and realised that we were the same. The knowledge brought me no peace.

‘Whom do I speak of when I sleep?’ I asked in a low voice, even though I already knew.

For a moment Eugenie looked afraid to speak. She regained her courage by avoiding my eyes once more.

‘Of Mademoiselle de la Serre,’ she softly said, ‘and sometimes of… the Emperor. I did not know that you knew him.’

‘Only…only slightly,’ I stammered, ‘and Elise, well…I dream of her often; one tends to dream of…of people one has failed…’

She mumbled.

‘Yes, one does.’

She turned her head and really looked at me for the first time since we had begun to speak. And I thought that she did not belong in this place; this world; this work. Then she smiled at me, and I thought, _she’s beautiful_ , and I rose abruptly from my seat and turned away.

**Author's Note:**

> Reviews are inspirational!


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